Author Archives: Rusty Rueff

About Rusty Rueff

Rusty Rueff, author of purposed worKING. Rusty Rueff is the former Chairman Emeritus of The GRAMMY Foundation in Los Angeles. He most recently completed the successful 16 month leadership role as Coordinating National Co-Chair for Technology for Obama (T4O) for the reelection of President Obama and ten-years of Board service and President of the Board of Trustees of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. Corporately, most recently Rueff was the Chief Executive Officer at SNOCAP, Inc. until the acquisition of the company by imeem, Inc. in April 2008. Before joining SNOCAP in 2005, he was Executive Vice President of Human Resources at Electronic Arts (EA) from 1998 until 2005. He was also with the PepsiCo companies for more than ten years, with the Pratt & Whitney division of United Technologies for two years, and in commercial radio as an on-air personality for six years. Rusty holds an M.S. in counseling and a B.A. in radio and television from Purdue University. In 2003 he was named a distinguished Purdue alumnus, and he and his wife, Patti, are the named benefactors of Purdue’s Patti and Rusty Rueff School of Visual and Performing Arts. He is a corporate director of Glassdoor.com and runcoach. He is the co-founder and Executive Committee Member of T4A.org, serves on the Founding Circle of The Centrist Project and a founding Board Member of The GRAMMY Music Education Coalition. He is also the co-author of the book Talent Force: A New Manifesto for the Human Side of Business. Rusty and his wife, Patti, reside in Hillsborough, CA and Charlestown, R.I.

day 2653: Winning Without Winning

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“So those who are last now will be first then, and those who are first will be last.”

I promise, this is my last Tour de France reference for this year.  It is over and as I write this Egan Bernal will win the 2019 Tour.  However, he never won a stage of this year’s Tour.  Had the 19th stage been completed, he probably would have won it, but because of the weather-forced cancellation of the stage, he did not get awarded a Stage win.  But, it doesn’t matter, he won the overall Tour classification and will hold the yellow jersey for a year and return next year wearing the number 1. How can you win, without winning?  This is part of what is great about the Tour de France.  It’s a race that happens over 21 Stages and it’s all about overall time so you don’t have to cross a finish line first, you just need to cross the final finish line in Paris with the lowest amount of time raced, overall.  That is how Bernal raced, but he still won.  There is a lesson in here for us as we go about our jobs.  I was talking last night to a Sales Vice President who was telling me about his best boss ever and how she became the President of the company without ever having been the top of any function in the business.  The owner saw how she had moved around the company over the years, learning, pacing her career and when time came to choose the next leader, she stood out because she’d worked all over the company, and even though she had never led any of those functions, she still was awarded the job. She won her career Tour de France without ever winning a stage. Yes, we can win without winning.

Jesus was clear for us that to be first, we must be last.  To serve others is to be in a higher order. In God’s Kingdom, now and to come, there is no winner, only those who subordinate and surrender themselves to Him. And what would our work be like if we adopted the same attitude?  What if we changed our definition of winning and instead focused more on how we can bring glory to God through what we do?  Yep, we can be whole in our soul without being worried about winning.

Reference:  Matthew 20:16 (New Living Translation)